Tag Archives: family

The Funny Side of Malfunctioning

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So if I’m going to take you on a journey with me into my brave new health world, let’s start with how I entered it. Which is, if I do say so myself, a very funny story.

I went to Mexico with the Wayfaring Writers. One of the attendees was a retired MD whose granddaughter had given her the flu just before she left, so she was getting antibiotics from a local clinic.

In Mexico, if you want antibiotics, you go to the pharmacy, see the doctor attached to it in an office next door, pay something around $5, and get a diagnosis. Watching my friend do this, I kept thinking how nice it would be to take a little souvenir home: cheap Cefalaxin. I’m one of the lucky ones allergic to penicillin. Getting cheap C to take back sounded good, but there was one problem.

I was healthy as a horse.

My MD friend smiled at me. “You’d have to lie. The easiest lie is to say you have a UTI. Those symptoms are easy to describe.”

“Are you enabling me?” I laughed.

She shrugged, and smiled again, and said nothing.

So two days later, having wrestled my moral concerns into submission, I went to a pharmacy, and saw a doctor. I paid him $3 and began describing the symptoms I did not have.

He kept staring at me. He knows I’m lying! Hot guilt suffused my face.

He asked, did I have a fever? Did I have a backache? Was I short of breath?

These are not UTI symptoms.

When I answered in the negative for all these, he said, through the Spanglish sign language combined with his phone’s Google Translator, that he was going to take my blood pressure. He used an electronic arm cuff, read the meter, and his eyebrows shot into his hairline.

He got out a sphagnometer (the manual cuff that requires a stethoscope) and took it again. Then he wrote something on a pad, and said, “You’re getting an EKG.”

Uhhhh, okay……

Twenty minutes and $15 later, I was naked on a bed while  a very handsome man ran his hands over my breasts. I swear to you, in that moment, the ONLY thing I could think was, I really should have been more specific about my fantasies for this trip.

I told the doc on our trip about my adventure, and she said likely the doctor who sent me for the EKG was reacting to something I was doing without knowing it: panting, perhaps, short of breath; or flushed because of the exertion of the heat and the heart not liking each other in a country full of salt and alcohol. Both of which were flowing through my veins at that point quite freely.

Two hours later, I was back in the kind doctor’s office with an envelope, which he took, studied, pursed his lips. Then he reached for his phone.

You have upper left blocked.

Dude, I need a noun. But Google was not yet up to providing “ascending aortic aneurysm.” That would come two months later, when I was hooked back into the American system struggling to get appointments.

I think fondly of Mexico these days, and that souvenir envelope containing the EKG that may well have saved my life (and a box of Cefalaxin). As anyone with an aneurysm can tell you, the most important thing about having one is knowing that you do.

So I’m on an interesting journey and will tell you more later, but all hail that kind doctor who looked, really looked, at me, and saw through me straight to my heart in the best possible way.

Christmas with the Family

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Sometimes you just can’t write blogs because you can’t say anything much. Family Christmases at my parents’ house tend to happen in January because that’s when my older sister and her husband can get away from his demanding job as a high end woodwork guy. He’s the only one who knows how to run the machine that does the specialty stuff and specialty stuff is a BIG DEAL for rich people around Christmas.

We don’t mind the lopsided holiday season. I tell everyone we’re Orthodox and that’s why we usually celebrate on Jan. 6. (We’re not but it’s easier than explaining family dynamics.)

Our family Christmases put the fun in dysfunctional. My dad grew up on a poultry farm, and once he left home, he refused to eat another bird for the rest of his life. He’s 86 now and still holding to that promise. My mother grew up on a poultry farm and likes turkey and chicken, just not eggs. “I know where they come from,” she says.

So cooking for my family on Epiphany Day – ehm, sorry, Christmas – can be, in a word, silly.

Start with breakfast. My father lives for bacon. Apparently the pig farm next door to his parents’ chicken run didn’t dissuade him. So he makes bacon in the microwave while my mother scrambles eggs for him and egg beaters for herself. And don’t forget the biscuit. This sounds not too weird, but the biscuit is made in an air fryer that doubles as a toaster, and it uses infrared waves instead of the usual convection, because my dad loves gadgets. So the label of the fryer has “Pizza, toast, baked potatoes” instead of the usual bake, broil, warm kind of thing. I refer to it as bake, cattle, and roll. Which no one in the family thinks funny.

The microwave doubles as a convection oven. Yeah, they make those. I have never actually explored whether dad is making bacon using microwaves or the more conventional–sorry, convectional–kind of heat. I am afraid he will start asking me to make it. I loath bacon, even the sight of it. That stuff is gross. I accept that this makes me unAmerican.

After breakfast, we open presents. All the women in my family are addicted to thrift stores. We tend to give each other interesting things: wicker baskets stuffed with little soaps, still marked 25 cents each. Habitat for Humanity tags have the kind of glue that could solve earthquake construction problems worldwide. This year I got a Snoopy and Woodstock that sing when you push the button (Goodwill). Tracy got a sweatshirt of Scotty dogs decorating a tree (AmVets). Mom got a bag with her first name embroidered on it (Salvation Army).

Then, because it is Jan. 6, we take down the tree. The tree is small, four feet high, made of plastic. Actually, you can’t see the tree because every square plastic inch of it is covered in ornaments.

My mother lives for Christmas. 19 plastic totes, two of them alone holding angels, adorn the corner of our garage. So after the ritual breakfast and presents, they adorn the living room. It takes two grown women an entire day to dismantle the tree, the seven nativity sets, and the outside decorations, replacing each in their designated box, and each box in a Merry Tetris Christmas sort of way back into their plastic totes. I started wrapping a non-box Nativity in paper towels in the tote, and my mother said, “Those pink ones are for the other nativity. Use the brown paper towels.”

Control issues aside, my mom really does Christmas up. There’s not a room in the house unfestooned with something red, green, or sparkly. During the pandemic, out of sheer boredom and unwillingness to buy one more plastic thing from Amazon, Jack and I made her a Christmas tree out of stacked and glued cat food cans, decorated with stick stars. She still has it. It’s hideous but you know, we made it. And it’s a Christmas decoration.

The ritual Replacing of the Totes (with their carefully repackaged objects in their carefully aligned boxes) back in the corner of the garage signals the end of the season. All is calm, all is right. Until next Thanksgiving, when we will pull it all out and do it again. Because, family.